fulltimer56
10-15-2006, 04:39 PM
NEWS OF THE WEEK FOR OCT. 09, 2006
Part 1 of 2
Will Watson Leave Potter?
Is she in or out? Emma Watson, who has played Hermione Granger in the first five Harry Potter movies, may bow out of the sixth, according to a report on the DigitalSpy.co.uk Web site. http://www.digitalspy.co.uk/article/ds37701.html?rss
Watson has hinted that she may not take part in the final two Harry Potter movies. The 16-year-old is currently filming the fifth film in the series, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, but has admitted that the time involved may lead to her having to forgo the final parts.
The actress, who recently aced her early exams, will turn 20 before the seventh film is completed and may not make the commitment to see the franchise through, the site reported. (Watson's co-stars Daniel Radcliffe, who plays Harry, and Rupert Grint, who plays Ron, have indicated they're in for the long haul.)
"I don't know yet," she said. "Every film is so huge, and it's a long time. I love to perform, but there are many other things I love doing." Order of the Phoenix debuts next July.
Ga. Mom Seeks Potter Ban
A suburban Atlanta county that sparked a public outcry when its libraries temporarily eliminated funding for Spanish-language fiction is now being asked to ban Harry Potter books from its schools, the Associated Press reported.
Laura Mallory, a mother of four, told a hearing officer for the Gwinnett County Board of Education that the popular fiction books are an "evil" attempt to indoctrinate children in the Wicca religion.
But Board of Education attorney Victoria Sweeny told the AP that if schools were to remove all books containing reference to witches, they would have to ban Macbeth and Cinderella.
In June, the county's library board eliminated the $3,000 that had been set aside to buy Spanish-language fiction in the coming fiscal year. One board member said the move came after some residents objected to using taxpayer dollars to entertain readers who might be illegal immigrants. Days later, the board reversed its decision amid accusations that the move was anti-Hispanic.
Lost Fans Cheer Premiere
Thousands of fans swamped Waikiki in Honolulu to get a glimpse of the stars of ABC's Lost at the show's red-carpet third-season premiere, the Associated Press reported.
The entire cast of the show attended the event on Sept. 30 to promote the season premiere, which aired Oct. 4 at 9 p.m. ET/PT. The show is filmed in Hawaii.
Before the season's first episode was shown on the big screen, producers asked that the audience keep quiet about it until after it airs on TV.
Abrams Talks Lost
J.J. Abrams, co-creator and executive producer of ABC's Lost, told SCI FI Wire that he will be more involved creatively in the third season, co-writing the Oct. 4 season premiere, directing an upcoming episode and laying the groundwork for the full season. "I miss being as actively a part of it as I had been in the first season," Abrams said in a conference call to journalists on Oct. 3. "And so, for me, writing the first episode with [co-creator Damon Lindelof] was just an absolute joy to get to write those characters again and be inside the heads of those characters. And as it goes on, the season, especially with where it goes, I look forward to not just directing an episode down the line, but I feel that we have a structure that's in place for the remainder of the year."
Last season, Abrams stepped back from the show while he directed and produced the feature film Mission: Impossible III. This year, he'll be dividing his time between Lost and two newer shows: What About Brian and Six Degrees, which also air on ABC. He's also working on a script for the upcoming 11th Star Trek film. His various producing obligations kept him from directing the seventh episode of the season, which is just about to begin filming, as initially planned, but Abrams said that he hopes to be able to helm at least one episode this season.
"I was supposed to leave today for Hawaii to begin prep on an episode I was set to direct that I was just dying to do, the story of which is just mind-blowing," Abrams said. "But because of work on some of the other shows, I've been unable to do that. And so I'm going to be directing an episode later in the season. But the thing that I'm so grateful about, and impressed by, is that Damon has managed to maintain a level of drama and gripping storytelling as he has. ... I think that when you get to the end of the season, it's such an exciting and unbelievable conclusion that I would hope maybe—I don't want to step on Jack Bender's shoes, because he's an incredible director-producer for us back in Hawaii—but I'd love to be able to work on the finale with him."
While he's excited to have a more active role in Lost this season, Abrams said that he doesn't want to create the impression that he's "taking the reins back" from Lindelof and executive producer Carlton Cuse, who ran the production in his absence. "The truth is that Damon and Carlton have been doing such a great job," Abrams said. "I'm there when needed. I've been reading the scripts, and, like I said, I worked on the first episode with Damon. ... There isn't anything that I felt the show was missing that I wanted to put back in. It was more, selfishly, I miss kind of getting my hands dirty and working on actually writing scenes and coming up with story." Lost returns in its regular timeslot, Wednesdays at 9 p.m. ET/PT. —Cindy White
Lost Wins, But Down
The Oct. 4 third-season premiere of ABC's Lost helped the network capture its third Wednesday of the television season in key demographics, but ratings declined 25 percent from the second-season premiere a year earlier, Variety reported.
According to preliminary nationals from Nielsen, Lost garnered a 7.5 rating in adults aged 18-49 and a total audience of 18.5 million viewers to lead the 9 o'clock hour in all key categories, despite the year-to-year erosion. The ratings were on par with its season-finale averages of last May.
Meanwhile, CBS held up well, with Jericho at 8 p.m. earning a 3.4 rating in the 18-49 demographic and 10.8 million viewers overall, down slightly against ABC's Dancing With the Stars.
Lost Is Back, With Character
J.J. Abrams, co-creator and executive producer of ABC's Lost, told SCI FI Wire that the show will continue to reveal the backgrounds of the characters in season three, including the origins of the mysterious Others. "It's all about who these people are," Abrams said in a conference call to journalists on Oct. 3. "And you'll discover in season three a whole group of people that will add to the mix. And I think in a pretty thrilling way."
In the Oct. 4 season premiere, which Abrams co-wrote with co-creator and executive producer Damon Lindelof, (spoilers ahead!) viewers got a glimpse of the suburbia-like neighborhood where the Others live on the island, while Jack (Matthew Fox), Kate (Evangeline Lilly) and Sawyer (Josh Holloway) got an idea of what they're up against as prisoners of the Others. The episode also introduced a new character, Juliet, played by series regular Elizabeth Mitchell. Abrams said that subsequent episodes in the third season will have a few more surprises in store.
"The beautiful thing about Lost is that there's very little that Lost isn't," he said. "Meaning you tune in every week, and you don't know who you're going to be focusing upon. You certainly don't know where you're going to be in the world and what the situation is going to be in that world. And that's part of the beauty of it. I think that what you could say Lost isn't, obviously, is that it's not a puzzle before it's a character piece. It's not a science fiction series before it's a character drama. ... To some degree, it's almost an anthology, in that every week you don't know where you're going to be and who you're going to see and what's going to happen in those flashbacks."
Abrams speculated that the demise of last year's crop of science-fiction-themed series was due to a lack of focus on character. "I feel like the reason why shows like Threshold or Surface [or] Invasion and those shows, all of which I'm sure had great promise, but they all kind of happened in response to something that I feel like wasn't really about the genre at all," he said. "The genre sort of is secondary. [Lost] is all about what really makes Locke tick. And what has Jin gone through that we don't quite understand in terms of making sense of his behavior, and things like that. The flashbacks are not serving shock value. They're serving character and their history. So to me, the fun of the whole show is that it's all about who the people are."
Lost will air six episodes this fall before taking a hiatus until the spring. When asked if the wait will be frustrating for the audience, Abrams hinted that the show may go out on a cliffhanger. "I wish I could promise that we were not going to make you crazy," he said. Lost airs Wednesdays at 9 p.m. ET/PT. —Cindy White
Lost Action Figures Coming
Disney and McFarlane Toys will unveil a line of action figures based on ABC's hit SF series Lost in an autograph event at the Toys "R" Us International Flagship store in New York on Nov. 6, from 4 p.m. to 7 p.m. ET.
The event will feature an as-yet-unnamed Lost cast member and McFarlane Toys creative force and Spawn creator Todd McFarlane, who will autograph purchases of the Lost Series 1 action figures. Tickets for the event will be announced at a later date on Spawn.com. http://www.spawn.com/
McFarlane Toys' Lost Series 1 figures will feature six characters from the show's first season: Jack, Kate, Hurley, Locke, Charlie and Shannon. The series of 6-inch action figures will include a detailed prop reproduction central to each character's story. Voice-chip technology will enable the figures to speak with a line from classic Lost episodes.
The third season of Lost kicks off Oct. 4 in the show's regular timeslot, Wednesdays at 9 p.m. ET/PT.
Sackhoff: Starbuck Still Troubled
Katee Sackhoff, who stars as Kara "Starbuck" Thrace on the SCI FI original series Battlestar Galactica, http://www.scifi.com/battlestar/ told SCI FI Wire that her character will continue to mature and evolve in the upcoming third season, but that her demons will still haunt her. As season three begins, Starbuck is living on the Cylon-occupied human settlement of New Caprica, where she's married to Anders (Michael Trucco) and dealing with her Cylon captor, Leoben (Callum Keith Rennie), who's got a shocking surprise for her.
"[Starbuck] has evolved, and she's starting to maybe believe in herself a little bit more, but she's still just as tormented by her past," Sackhoff said in an interview. "That's something that unless she sits down and deals with it, it's never going to get better. And it is something that continues to hold her back."
Sackhoff added: "So we've seen her try and deal with things in her past and try and face situations head-on now. ... She's definitely becoming more of a stronger person , but she's even more messed up than she was in the beginning. I guess every character kind of is. But Kara is a character who constantly gets kicked down when she tries to improve her life. Usually, she's her own demise or will be, inevitably, I think." Battlestar Galactica launches its third season with a two-hour premiere on Oct. 6 at 9 p.m. ET/PT. —Ian Spelling
[b]Battlestar's Roslin Lives On
Mary McDonnell, who plays former president Laura Roslin in SCI FI Channel's original series Battlestar Galactica, http://www.scifi.com/battlestar/ told SCI FI Wire that she feared the worst last year when it seemed that her breast cancer had reached a critical point. Roslin was saved at the last minute by Baltar (James Callis), who injected her with blood from a human-Cylon infant, but Roslin's long-term prognosis and the political ramifications of Baltar's actions remain to be seen. As season three begins on Oct. 6, the former president is working as a teacher in the human settlement on New Caprica, whose government is led by the current president, Baltar.
"I was very worried that they were writing me out," McDonnell said in a conference call. "As a matter of fact I still think they were, and James Callis convinced them not to, and so he offered this solution of the stem-cell transplant. Actually, no, not really. But it was a very insecure feeling, even though one knew rationally or one believed. ... And so I think there were two things going on in me. One was a little bit of anxiety about the future, and the other one was the commitment to getting as much of the job done as I could before it was curtains."
McDonnell added: "In terms of that and how it plays out in season three, it is really yet to be known, the implications of the way her life was saved, either how it affected her or how it affects certain relationships. But it's underneath the surface, and eventually certain things are said about it. But we'll see how it affects the story, I think, later on." Battlestar Galactica launches its third season with a two-hour premiere in its regular timeslot, Fridays at 9 p.m. ET/PT. —Ian Spelling
Battlestar Builds, Gets Dark
David Eick, co-executive producer of SCI FI Channel's original series Battlestar Galactica, http://www.scifi.com/battlestar/ told SCI FI Wire that the upcoming third season of the show is quite different from, but still of a piece with, all that preceded it in the miniseries and seasons one and two. For one thing, the humans will be a little darker—and the Cylons not so one-dimensional.
"I would say that season three is taking another big step," Eick said in a conference-call interview. "In the first half, anyway, it's moving more towards the Cylon point of view. It's saying, 'OK, you've seen how the human beings can be darker and perhaps more unforgivable in ways that you don't normally do with protagonists. Let's see how these antagonists whom we've generally assumed nothing but the worst from have their own sympathies, have ways in which they're not exactly perfect, how they are stunted and less evolved on some fundamental fronts than the humans. It's a very interesting and, I think, bold and risky way to go, because the heart of the show has always been about, in a way, how the Cylons and humans are so eerily alike. And I think what we're saying with the first half of season three is 'Not so fast. They're also quite different, and here's how.'"
At the end of last season, the survivors of the human race had built a settlement on New Caprica, only to find themselves occupied by the invading Cylons. The story of the third season picks things up from that cliffhanger. Eick said that the third season builds on what came before.
"I think the miniseries in a very obvious way was about setting things up, but I also think that, more than any other piece of this journey, [it] was about not just what it was, but what it wasn't," Eick said. "Those were the days when the title was very much associated with the 1970s show, not that it still doesn't have that, but a great deal of what we were doing was developed and depicted and illustrated and also, I think, was responded to in the context of how it wasn't like the old show. And so, in many respects, the miniseries was a statement about what it wasn't as much as it was a statement about what it was."
Eick added: "The first season was about investigating the foibles and dark side and really the Achilles' heel of humanity more than how are we going to outrun the Cylons. In that first season we really got into the depths of how the so-called good guys really aren't so good and really don't have all the answers and are not mouthpieces for morality by any stretch. And I think just that alone was its own statement, because in this genre, certainly, and in drama in general, certainly in TV, there's a tendency to expect that your protagonists are the good guys, that they do have the answers, and that in the end they're going to do the right thing. I think the first season was making a statement that that's not always the case."
The second season, Eick said, was all about strange bedfellows and switching roles. "The people who were at each other's throats in season one were suddenly getting each other's back and vice versa," he said. "It was about Gaius Baltar [James Callis] moving into a completely new realm. [He's] not a man who's after power at all. He's really just out for himself and finds himself, ironically, in a scenario where the only way he really can ensure, in his mind, self-preservation is to move to this place that he never dreamed he'd be in. And, conversely, [season two ] demonstrated the ways in which Sharon [Grace Park], of all the characters, becomes the most sympathetic and the one to whom we relate to the most." Battlestar Galactica launched into its third season with a two-hour premiere on Oct. 6 at 9 p.m. ET/PT. —Ian Spelling
Heroes Flies High For NBC
NBC's superhero drama Heroes, which came in with low expectations and no high-profile names attached, is shaping up as a hit for the peacock network, Variety reported.
Heroes, whose second episode this week earned a 5.5 rating in adults aged 18-49 and nearly 13 million viewers overall, saw its viewership decline just 7 percent from its strong series premiere, beating its broadcast rivals in most demographics, the trade paper reported.
No other first-year drama this fall has rated higher in the 18-49 demographic with its second episode than did Heroes. Of all NBC dramas to premiere in the past three seasons, only Medium rated higher in week two.
Heroes stars Ali Larter and an ensemble cast who portray ordinary people who discover they have unusual powers. NBC is owned by NBC Universal, which also owns SCIFI.COM.
Heroes Gets Full Pickup
NBC has given a full-season order for its hit superhero series Heroes, the network announced. Heroes is averaging a 5.7 rating among adults aged 18-49 and 13.5 million viewers overall, making it the number-one new series this fall in adults 18-49, tied with ABC's Brothers & Sisters, NBC said.
"Heroes has delivered exceptional ratings since its premiere, and we're even more impressed with the quality of the upcoming episodes," Kevin Reilly, president, NBC Entertainment, said in a statement. "We have complete confidence in creator-executive producer Tim Kring. The best is yet to come over the course of a full season with this newest drama sensation." Heroes airs Mondays at 9 p.m. ET/PT.
NBC is owned by NBC Universal, which also owns SCIFI.COM.
Lucas: 3-D Clone Wars Due
Star Wars creator George Lucas told the Associated Press that he's making a 3-D computer-animated version of his hit animated Clone Wars TV series, which could air as early as next year, although he hasn't sold the show to a network yet.
The series would be set during the time when the Republic is fighting a civil war against separatists led by Count Dooku.
"It basically has all the main characters," such as Anakin Skywalker and Obi-Wan Kenobi, Lucas told the AP. But the stars who played them in the movies won't voice them for the TV show. "There's nobody famous," Lucas said.
The show is planned as a continuation of the Emmy-winning 2-D animated Clone Wars, which aired in 25 episodes on Cartoon Network from 2003 to 2005.
Nolan: Knight Will Have Dent
Christopher Nolan, who will direct the Batman sequel The Dark Knight, confirmed to IGN.com http://movies.ign.com/articles/736/736931p1.html that the character of district attorney Harvey Dent, who becomes the villainous "Two Face," will appear in the movie. "I don't want to go into too many specifics. Yes, he is" in the film, Nolan told the site after a screening of Nolan's first movie, Following, at the Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood. No one has been cast yet, he added.
As for the status of the sequel, Nolan said, "I haven't finished the script yet. I'm supposed to be doing it right now. ... It's a pretty direct continuation of where the last film left off, and the last scene of Batman Begins suggests a strong direction we wanted to take the story in. It absolutely carries on with a lot of the thematic concerns and hopefully takes it someplace new." The final scene of the previous movie shows Batman (Christian Bale) examining a playing card with an image of the Joker.
Nolan also talked briefly about his plans to adapt the classic British TV series The Prisoner. "The Prisoner is something I've been interested in for quite a long time, and I think I've figured out the take on how we'd approach it," he said. "The relevance of it today. David and Janet Peoples are terrific, who you know wrote Blade Runner and Twelve Monkeys, ... all kinds of great movies. They're working on the script right now. I wouldn't want to speak for them. I'm very excited to see what they've come up with."
Lucas: Indy 4 Still Developing
George Lucas told Variety that the much-delayed Indiana Jones 4 is still in development, but not exactly on the horizon. "Steve [Spielberg] and I are still working away, trying to come up with something we're happy with," Lucas told the trade paper in an interview at the Oct. 4 groundbreaking ceremony for the renamed School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. (Lucas gave the school, his alma mater, $175 million.) "Hopefully in a short time we will come to an agreement. Or something," Lucas added, without a great deal of enthusiasm.
Lucas added: "Right now we're doing television, which looks great. I'm very, very happy with it," he said of his animation division. "And out of doing the animation, we're getting the skill set and the people and putting the studio in place so we can do a feature. But it's probably going to be another year before we have the people and the systems in place to do a feature film." Lucas expects to serve as executive producer on two feature films, as well as TV shows, including a live-action Star Wars series.
Transformers Shoots In Detroit
Michael Bay's Transformers movie is shooting in downtown Detroit, on many of the same streets where the action director shot his last SF opus, The Island, the Detroit Free Press reported.
Transformers—based on the 1980s toy line, comics and animated TV series—is shooting on Fort Street between Washington and Griswold and Shelby between Congress and Lafayette this week, the newspaper reported. The movie will also shoot in the abandoned Michigan Central Depot. The same locations were used in 2005's The Island.
In August, SCI FI Wire visited the set of Transformers in downtown Los Angeles. http://www.scifi.com/scifiwire/index.php?category=0&id=37687 Transformers is also shooting in various cities, including Chicago and Washington. It is slated to open on July 4, 2007.
Pan Mirrors Devil's Backbone
Guillermo del Toro, writer and director of the upcoming fantasy film Pan's Labyrinth, told SCI FI Wire that the Spanish-language movie is a companion piece to his critically acclaimed 2001 film The Devil's Backbone. Both films share roughly the same historical milieu—during and after the Spanish Civil War—and mix fantastical elements with brutal realism. But the films also differ importantly.
"[The] Devil's Backbone ... was a movie that sort of looked at innocence and brutality or innocence in time of war, and I did it back in 2001," del Toro said in an interview last week. "And when it got released in America, it got released in America around Sept. 11th, and I felt that that story needed sort of a complementary piece now, because ... five years later, [everything] has changed so much, and I decided to try and make a movie that took place five years later. ... So Devil's Backbone was 2001. Now, this is 2006, and [while] Devil's Backbone was set in '39, ... Pan's Labyrinth is set in 1944."
Pan's Labyrinth centers on the character of 10-year-old Ofelia (Ivana Baquero), a dreamy girl enamored of fairy tales who moves to Navarra in the Spanish countryside with her mother, Carmen (Ariadna Gil), who is pregnant with the child of her new husband, the local Fascist military commander, Capt. Vidal (Sergi Lopez). In Navarra, as Capt. Vidal tries to track down rebels lurking in the woods, Ofelia finds herself drawn into a mysterious maze in the forest, where she makes the acquaintance of supernatural creatures who tell her that her fantastical destiny lies elsewhere.
"The idea was to literally explore how that world and our world have changed so much and make sort of a point about it in like a fable or a parable," del Toro said. "Not make a straight up political film, but use fantasy as a sounding board, like in Devil's Backbone."
But the two films are completely different, del Toro said. "They're similar, but I call them a sister and brother movie," he said. "They are a mirror movie. ... I think that Devil's Backbone, for example, is a very male film. It's a boy's movie. It's very much what it is to be a male child, a kid, a boy, and the brutality of that universe. And for me, Pan's Labyrinth is the cross between a female universe and a masculine force, which is a very brutal sort of paternal structure, ... that is fascism. I think that's one of the big differences. The bad guy in Pan's Labyrinth is a fascist. The bad guy in Devil's Backbone is a proto-fascist. The guy that, if he had the tools, the education and the resources, he may become a fascist, but he's just a bully right there. And this guy in Pan's Labyrinth is a full-blown fascist without any [reservation]."
Pan's Labyrinth, a Spanish-Mexican co-production, has been named Mexico's official entry for the best-foreign-film Oscar. It opens in limited release on Dec. 29 and goes wide in January. —Patrick Lee, News Editor
Del Toro Talks The Strain
Filmmaker Guillermo del Toro offered SCI FI Wire new details about the proposed television series he's developing, called The Strain. "It's horror," del Toro (Pan's Labyrinth) said in an interview last week in Los Angeles. He added: "It would be a really nasty, nasty fantasy. ... My deal is with Fox, and we're in the process of developing the story and seeing if we see eye to eye." Del Toro currently has a development deal with the Fox network.
Del Toro added: "I already wrote the bible and the character arcs for each character and so forth, so I'm doing all the documents on it." But he declined to say much about The Strain. "It's too early on, the very early stages of that."
Del Toro is also trying to develop video games. "I think that that's the where the future of storytelling is going to go to, a hybrid form that encompasses all of the narrative forms that we now know," he said. "TV, video games, movies, all of these into one." Del Toro's fantasy film Pan's Labyrinth is due to open in limited release on Dec. 29 before going wide in January 2007. —Patrick Lee, News Editor
Gillard Helming War Games 2
TV director Stuart Gillard (Charmed) has been tapped to helm the sequel to the 1983 Matthew Broderick film WarGames, the Production Weekly Web site reported.
Randall M. Badat has penned the sequel, War Games 2: The Dead Game, which is scheduled to begin principal photography mid-November in locations around Montreal.
The storyline follows a teenage hacker whose world gets turned upside after he plays an online terrorist-attack simulator game against a government supercomputer designed to profile potential terrorists. All hell breaks loose when Homeland Security is convinced that he's a terrorist intent on disrupting the fabric of society.
Kern Eyes Midnighters Show
Former Charmed executive producer Brad Kern told SCI FI Wire that he's trying to develop a television series based on the Scott Westerfeld young adult novel Midnighters: The Secret Hour. If everything were to come together, Kern would likely serve the production as executive producer.
"The most intriguing part about it is that there's a secret 25th hour that occurs at the stroke of midnight, so when the rest of us are frozen in time, basically, a whole hour exists, and in that frozen hour there are creepy, ghastly, ghostly beings that are trying to do bad things," Kern said in an interview. "There are also a select chosen few people, those who were born at midnight, who can actually live and walk amongst the frozen world. A car frozen on the street is actually going 50 miles an hour. Raindrops are frozen in place. But these Midnighters, as they walk through the rain, they actually carve out a hole because they're walking through it. So they have one hour to exist in this kind of co-existing world."
Kern added: "It's a very intriguing world. It's a very cinematically visual area. At this point I'm not yet convinced that we've figured out how to make it a series. We'd want to up the ages of the characters in the book from all teenagers in high school to probably [young adults] in their middle to late 20s. So there's a lot to work [still to be done], but it's an intriguing idea, and, of course, I adore and thrive in this supernatural realm. So it's something that allows me to be a daddy at home to my two kids and to, part-time, see if I can help Warner Brothers launch this new series." —Ian Spelling
Deal Includes Near Dark Remake
Michael Bay's production company, Platinum Dunes, has made a three-year, first-look deal with Rogue Pictures to develop horror films, including a a remake of the 1987 vampire movie Near Dark, Variety reported.
Rogue, the genre arm of Universal-based Focus Features, has made a deal with Platinum's Bay (director of the upcoming Transformers) and partners Brad Fuller and Andrew Form. The trio will produce horror films budgeted under $25 million and receive as much as 10 percent of the first-dollar gross, one of the richest producer deals in town. Platinum has already completed production on a Rogue remake of The Hitcher, for April release.
The Near Dark remake, about a cowboy wooed into joining a roving band of vampires, will be helmed by Samuel Bayer. Matt Venne is writing the script, and Charles Meeker and Amy Kaufman also produce. Production begins early next year.
The deal will also include a remake of 1987's The Changeling, which Rogue already had on its development roster. Separately, Platinum Dunes is remaking Hitchcock's The Birds for Universal Pictures.
Rogue, Focus and Universal are all owned by NBC Universal, which also owns SCIFI.COM.
Trek Auction Starts Big
The bidding began quickly on the first day of Christie's three-day New York auction of more than 1,000 lots of Star Trek memorabilia, with a captain's chair once belonging to Jean-Luc Picard from the bridge of the starship Enterprise-E going for a gavel price of $52,000—far beyond the presale estimate of $9,000, the Associated Press reported.
The auction kicked off on Oct. 5, with everything from costumes and props to blueprints and furniture on sale from the archives of CBS Paramount Television Studios. Bids were accepted on the floor, on the phone and on the Internet. Auction-house employees wore Star Trek costumes, including a pair of pointy Vulcan ears made famous by original star Leonard Nimoy.
The auction is one of several events being held to commemorate the 40th anniversary of Star Trek.
*[i]I have the Christies's catalogues for this and boy did I wish I could had bid on some of the stuff that were in it. I even have the price list of the winning bids. BTW there are two catalogues and both of them are about an inch thick.
Part 1 of 2
Will Watson Leave Potter?
Is she in or out? Emma Watson, who has played Hermione Granger in the first five Harry Potter movies, may bow out of the sixth, according to a report on the DigitalSpy.co.uk Web site. http://www.digitalspy.co.uk/article/ds37701.html?rss
Watson has hinted that she may not take part in the final two Harry Potter movies. The 16-year-old is currently filming the fifth film in the series, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, but has admitted that the time involved may lead to her having to forgo the final parts.
The actress, who recently aced her early exams, will turn 20 before the seventh film is completed and may not make the commitment to see the franchise through, the site reported. (Watson's co-stars Daniel Radcliffe, who plays Harry, and Rupert Grint, who plays Ron, have indicated they're in for the long haul.)
"I don't know yet," she said. "Every film is so huge, and it's a long time. I love to perform, but there are many other things I love doing." Order of the Phoenix debuts next July.
Ga. Mom Seeks Potter Ban
A suburban Atlanta county that sparked a public outcry when its libraries temporarily eliminated funding for Spanish-language fiction is now being asked to ban Harry Potter books from its schools, the Associated Press reported.
Laura Mallory, a mother of four, told a hearing officer for the Gwinnett County Board of Education that the popular fiction books are an "evil" attempt to indoctrinate children in the Wicca religion.
But Board of Education attorney Victoria Sweeny told the AP that if schools were to remove all books containing reference to witches, they would have to ban Macbeth and Cinderella.
In June, the county's library board eliminated the $3,000 that had been set aside to buy Spanish-language fiction in the coming fiscal year. One board member said the move came after some residents objected to using taxpayer dollars to entertain readers who might be illegal immigrants. Days later, the board reversed its decision amid accusations that the move was anti-Hispanic.
Lost Fans Cheer Premiere
Thousands of fans swamped Waikiki in Honolulu to get a glimpse of the stars of ABC's Lost at the show's red-carpet third-season premiere, the Associated Press reported.
The entire cast of the show attended the event on Sept. 30 to promote the season premiere, which aired Oct. 4 at 9 p.m. ET/PT. The show is filmed in Hawaii.
Before the season's first episode was shown on the big screen, producers asked that the audience keep quiet about it until after it airs on TV.
Abrams Talks Lost
J.J. Abrams, co-creator and executive producer of ABC's Lost, told SCI FI Wire that he will be more involved creatively in the third season, co-writing the Oct. 4 season premiere, directing an upcoming episode and laying the groundwork for the full season. "I miss being as actively a part of it as I had been in the first season," Abrams said in a conference call to journalists on Oct. 3. "And so, for me, writing the first episode with [co-creator Damon Lindelof] was just an absolute joy to get to write those characters again and be inside the heads of those characters. And as it goes on, the season, especially with where it goes, I look forward to not just directing an episode down the line, but I feel that we have a structure that's in place for the remainder of the year."
Last season, Abrams stepped back from the show while he directed and produced the feature film Mission: Impossible III. This year, he'll be dividing his time between Lost and two newer shows: What About Brian and Six Degrees, which also air on ABC. He's also working on a script for the upcoming 11th Star Trek film. His various producing obligations kept him from directing the seventh episode of the season, which is just about to begin filming, as initially planned, but Abrams said that he hopes to be able to helm at least one episode this season.
"I was supposed to leave today for Hawaii to begin prep on an episode I was set to direct that I was just dying to do, the story of which is just mind-blowing," Abrams said. "But because of work on some of the other shows, I've been unable to do that. And so I'm going to be directing an episode later in the season. But the thing that I'm so grateful about, and impressed by, is that Damon has managed to maintain a level of drama and gripping storytelling as he has. ... I think that when you get to the end of the season, it's such an exciting and unbelievable conclusion that I would hope maybe—I don't want to step on Jack Bender's shoes, because he's an incredible director-producer for us back in Hawaii—but I'd love to be able to work on the finale with him."
While he's excited to have a more active role in Lost this season, Abrams said that he doesn't want to create the impression that he's "taking the reins back" from Lindelof and executive producer Carlton Cuse, who ran the production in his absence. "The truth is that Damon and Carlton have been doing such a great job," Abrams said. "I'm there when needed. I've been reading the scripts, and, like I said, I worked on the first episode with Damon. ... There isn't anything that I felt the show was missing that I wanted to put back in. It was more, selfishly, I miss kind of getting my hands dirty and working on actually writing scenes and coming up with story." Lost returns in its regular timeslot, Wednesdays at 9 p.m. ET/PT. —Cindy White
Lost Wins, But Down
The Oct. 4 third-season premiere of ABC's Lost helped the network capture its third Wednesday of the television season in key demographics, but ratings declined 25 percent from the second-season premiere a year earlier, Variety reported.
According to preliminary nationals from Nielsen, Lost garnered a 7.5 rating in adults aged 18-49 and a total audience of 18.5 million viewers to lead the 9 o'clock hour in all key categories, despite the year-to-year erosion. The ratings were on par with its season-finale averages of last May.
Meanwhile, CBS held up well, with Jericho at 8 p.m. earning a 3.4 rating in the 18-49 demographic and 10.8 million viewers overall, down slightly against ABC's Dancing With the Stars.
Lost Is Back, With Character
J.J. Abrams, co-creator and executive producer of ABC's Lost, told SCI FI Wire that the show will continue to reveal the backgrounds of the characters in season three, including the origins of the mysterious Others. "It's all about who these people are," Abrams said in a conference call to journalists on Oct. 3. "And you'll discover in season three a whole group of people that will add to the mix. And I think in a pretty thrilling way."
In the Oct. 4 season premiere, which Abrams co-wrote with co-creator and executive producer Damon Lindelof, (spoilers ahead!) viewers got a glimpse of the suburbia-like neighborhood where the Others live on the island, while Jack (Matthew Fox), Kate (Evangeline Lilly) and Sawyer (Josh Holloway) got an idea of what they're up against as prisoners of the Others. The episode also introduced a new character, Juliet, played by series regular Elizabeth Mitchell. Abrams said that subsequent episodes in the third season will have a few more surprises in store.
"The beautiful thing about Lost is that there's very little that Lost isn't," he said. "Meaning you tune in every week, and you don't know who you're going to be focusing upon. You certainly don't know where you're going to be in the world and what the situation is going to be in that world. And that's part of the beauty of it. I think that what you could say Lost isn't, obviously, is that it's not a puzzle before it's a character piece. It's not a science fiction series before it's a character drama. ... To some degree, it's almost an anthology, in that every week you don't know where you're going to be and who you're going to see and what's going to happen in those flashbacks."
Abrams speculated that the demise of last year's crop of science-fiction-themed series was due to a lack of focus on character. "I feel like the reason why shows like Threshold or Surface [or] Invasion and those shows, all of which I'm sure had great promise, but they all kind of happened in response to something that I feel like wasn't really about the genre at all," he said. "The genre sort of is secondary. [Lost] is all about what really makes Locke tick. And what has Jin gone through that we don't quite understand in terms of making sense of his behavior, and things like that. The flashbacks are not serving shock value. They're serving character and their history. So to me, the fun of the whole show is that it's all about who the people are."
Lost will air six episodes this fall before taking a hiatus until the spring. When asked if the wait will be frustrating for the audience, Abrams hinted that the show may go out on a cliffhanger. "I wish I could promise that we were not going to make you crazy," he said. Lost airs Wednesdays at 9 p.m. ET/PT. —Cindy White
Lost Action Figures Coming
Disney and McFarlane Toys will unveil a line of action figures based on ABC's hit SF series Lost in an autograph event at the Toys "R" Us International Flagship store in New York on Nov. 6, from 4 p.m. to 7 p.m. ET.
The event will feature an as-yet-unnamed Lost cast member and McFarlane Toys creative force and Spawn creator Todd McFarlane, who will autograph purchases of the Lost Series 1 action figures. Tickets for the event will be announced at a later date on Spawn.com. http://www.spawn.com/
McFarlane Toys' Lost Series 1 figures will feature six characters from the show's first season: Jack, Kate, Hurley, Locke, Charlie and Shannon. The series of 6-inch action figures will include a detailed prop reproduction central to each character's story. Voice-chip technology will enable the figures to speak with a line from classic Lost episodes.
The third season of Lost kicks off Oct. 4 in the show's regular timeslot, Wednesdays at 9 p.m. ET/PT.
Sackhoff: Starbuck Still Troubled
Katee Sackhoff, who stars as Kara "Starbuck" Thrace on the SCI FI original series Battlestar Galactica, http://www.scifi.com/battlestar/ told SCI FI Wire that her character will continue to mature and evolve in the upcoming third season, but that her demons will still haunt her. As season three begins, Starbuck is living on the Cylon-occupied human settlement of New Caprica, where she's married to Anders (Michael Trucco) and dealing with her Cylon captor, Leoben (Callum Keith Rennie), who's got a shocking surprise for her.
"[Starbuck] has evolved, and she's starting to maybe believe in herself a little bit more, but she's still just as tormented by her past," Sackhoff said in an interview. "That's something that unless she sits down and deals with it, it's never going to get better. And it is something that continues to hold her back."
Sackhoff added: "So we've seen her try and deal with things in her past and try and face situations head-on now. ... She's definitely becoming more of a stronger person , but she's even more messed up than she was in the beginning. I guess every character kind of is. But Kara is a character who constantly gets kicked down when she tries to improve her life. Usually, she's her own demise or will be, inevitably, I think." Battlestar Galactica launches its third season with a two-hour premiere on Oct. 6 at 9 p.m. ET/PT. —Ian Spelling
[b]Battlestar's Roslin Lives On
Mary McDonnell, who plays former president Laura Roslin in SCI FI Channel's original series Battlestar Galactica, http://www.scifi.com/battlestar/ told SCI FI Wire that she feared the worst last year when it seemed that her breast cancer had reached a critical point. Roslin was saved at the last minute by Baltar (James Callis), who injected her with blood from a human-Cylon infant, but Roslin's long-term prognosis and the political ramifications of Baltar's actions remain to be seen. As season three begins on Oct. 6, the former president is working as a teacher in the human settlement on New Caprica, whose government is led by the current president, Baltar.
"I was very worried that they were writing me out," McDonnell said in a conference call. "As a matter of fact I still think they were, and James Callis convinced them not to, and so he offered this solution of the stem-cell transplant. Actually, no, not really. But it was a very insecure feeling, even though one knew rationally or one believed. ... And so I think there were two things going on in me. One was a little bit of anxiety about the future, and the other one was the commitment to getting as much of the job done as I could before it was curtains."
McDonnell added: "In terms of that and how it plays out in season three, it is really yet to be known, the implications of the way her life was saved, either how it affected her or how it affects certain relationships. But it's underneath the surface, and eventually certain things are said about it. But we'll see how it affects the story, I think, later on." Battlestar Galactica launches its third season with a two-hour premiere in its regular timeslot, Fridays at 9 p.m. ET/PT. —Ian Spelling
Battlestar Builds, Gets Dark
David Eick, co-executive producer of SCI FI Channel's original series Battlestar Galactica, http://www.scifi.com/battlestar/ told SCI FI Wire that the upcoming third season of the show is quite different from, but still of a piece with, all that preceded it in the miniseries and seasons one and two. For one thing, the humans will be a little darker—and the Cylons not so one-dimensional.
"I would say that season three is taking another big step," Eick said in a conference-call interview. "In the first half, anyway, it's moving more towards the Cylon point of view. It's saying, 'OK, you've seen how the human beings can be darker and perhaps more unforgivable in ways that you don't normally do with protagonists. Let's see how these antagonists whom we've generally assumed nothing but the worst from have their own sympathies, have ways in which they're not exactly perfect, how they are stunted and less evolved on some fundamental fronts than the humans. It's a very interesting and, I think, bold and risky way to go, because the heart of the show has always been about, in a way, how the Cylons and humans are so eerily alike. And I think what we're saying with the first half of season three is 'Not so fast. They're also quite different, and here's how.'"
At the end of last season, the survivors of the human race had built a settlement on New Caprica, only to find themselves occupied by the invading Cylons. The story of the third season picks things up from that cliffhanger. Eick said that the third season builds on what came before.
"I think the miniseries in a very obvious way was about setting things up, but I also think that, more than any other piece of this journey, [it] was about not just what it was, but what it wasn't," Eick said. "Those were the days when the title was very much associated with the 1970s show, not that it still doesn't have that, but a great deal of what we were doing was developed and depicted and illustrated and also, I think, was responded to in the context of how it wasn't like the old show. And so, in many respects, the miniseries was a statement about what it wasn't as much as it was a statement about what it was."
Eick added: "The first season was about investigating the foibles and dark side and really the Achilles' heel of humanity more than how are we going to outrun the Cylons. In that first season we really got into the depths of how the so-called good guys really aren't so good and really don't have all the answers and are not mouthpieces for morality by any stretch. And I think just that alone was its own statement, because in this genre, certainly, and in drama in general, certainly in TV, there's a tendency to expect that your protagonists are the good guys, that they do have the answers, and that in the end they're going to do the right thing. I think the first season was making a statement that that's not always the case."
The second season, Eick said, was all about strange bedfellows and switching roles. "The people who were at each other's throats in season one were suddenly getting each other's back and vice versa," he said. "It was about Gaius Baltar [James Callis] moving into a completely new realm. [He's] not a man who's after power at all. He's really just out for himself and finds himself, ironically, in a scenario where the only way he really can ensure, in his mind, self-preservation is to move to this place that he never dreamed he'd be in. And, conversely, [season two ] demonstrated the ways in which Sharon [Grace Park], of all the characters, becomes the most sympathetic and the one to whom we relate to the most." Battlestar Galactica launched into its third season with a two-hour premiere on Oct. 6 at 9 p.m. ET/PT. —Ian Spelling
Heroes Flies High For NBC
NBC's superhero drama Heroes, which came in with low expectations and no high-profile names attached, is shaping up as a hit for the peacock network, Variety reported.
Heroes, whose second episode this week earned a 5.5 rating in adults aged 18-49 and nearly 13 million viewers overall, saw its viewership decline just 7 percent from its strong series premiere, beating its broadcast rivals in most demographics, the trade paper reported.
No other first-year drama this fall has rated higher in the 18-49 demographic with its second episode than did Heroes. Of all NBC dramas to premiere in the past three seasons, only Medium rated higher in week two.
Heroes stars Ali Larter and an ensemble cast who portray ordinary people who discover they have unusual powers. NBC is owned by NBC Universal, which also owns SCIFI.COM.
Heroes Gets Full Pickup
NBC has given a full-season order for its hit superhero series Heroes, the network announced. Heroes is averaging a 5.7 rating among adults aged 18-49 and 13.5 million viewers overall, making it the number-one new series this fall in adults 18-49, tied with ABC's Brothers & Sisters, NBC said.
"Heroes has delivered exceptional ratings since its premiere, and we're even more impressed with the quality of the upcoming episodes," Kevin Reilly, president, NBC Entertainment, said in a statement. "We have complete confidence in creator-executive producer Tim Kring. The best is yet to come over the course of a full season with this newest drama sensation." Heroes airs Mondays at 9 p.m. ET/PT.
NBC is owned by NBC Universal, which also owns SCIFI.COM.
Lucas: 3-D Clone Wars Due
Star Wars creator George Lucas told the Associated Press that he's making a 3-D computer-animated version of his hit animated Clone Wars TV series, which could air as early as next year, although he hasn't sold the show to a network yet.
The series would be set during the time when the Republic is fighting a civil war against separatists led by Count Dooku.
"It basically has all the main characters," such as Anakin Skywalker and Obi-Wan Kenobi, Lucas told the AP. But the stars who played them in the movies won't voice them for the TV show. "There's nobody famous," Lucas said.
The show is planned as a continuation of the Emmy-winning 2-D animated Clone Wars, which aired in 25 episodes on Cartoon Network from 2003 to 2005.
Nolan: Knight Will Have Dent
Christopher Nolan, who will direct the Batman sequel The Dark Knight, confirmed to IGN.com http://movies.ign.com/articles/736/736931p1.html that the character of district attorney Harvey Dent, who becomes the villainous "Two Face," will appear in the movie. "I don't want to go into too many specifics. Yes, he is" in the film, Nolan told the site after a screening of Nolan's first movie, Following, at the Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood. No one has been cast yet, he added.
As for the status of the sequel, Nolan said, "I haven't finished the script yet. I'm supposed to be doing it right now. ... It's a pretty direct continuation of where the last film left off, and the last scene of Batman Begins suggests a strong direction we wanted to take the story in. It absolutely carries on with a lot of the thematic concerns and hopefully takes it someplace new." The final scene of the previous movie shows Batman (Christian Bale) examining a playing card with an image of the Joker.
Nolan also talked briefly about his plans to adapt the classic British TV series The Prisoner. "The Prisoner is something I've been interested in for quite a long time, and I think I've figured out the take on how we'd approach it," he said. "The relevance of it today. David and Janet Peoples are terrific, who you know wrote Blade Runner and Twelve Monkeys, ... all kinds of great movies. They're working on the script right now. I wouldn't want to speak for them. I'm very excited to see what they've come up with."
Lucas: Indy 4 Still Developing
George Lucas told Variety that the much-delayed Indiana Jones 4 is still in development, but not exactly on the horizon. "Steve [Spielberg] and I are still working away, trying to come up with something we're happy with," Lucas told the trade paper in an interview at the Oct. 4 groundbreaking ceremony for the renamed School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. (Lucas gave the school, his alma mater, $175 million.) "Hopefully in a short time we will come to an agreement. Or something," Lucas added, without a great deal of enthusiasm.
Lucas added: "Right now we're doing television, which looks great. I'm very, very happy with it," he said of his animation division. "And out of doing the animation, we're getting the skill set and the people and putting the studio in place so we can do a feature. But it's probably going to be another year before we have the people and the systems in place to do a feature film." Lucas expects to serve as executive producer on two feature films, as well as TV shows, including a live-action Star Wars series.
Transformers Shoots In Detroit
Michael Bay's Transformers movie is shooting in downtown Detroit, on many of the same streets where the action director shot his last SF opus, The Island, the Detroit Free Press reported.
Transformers—based on the 1980s toy line, comics and animated TV series—is shooting on Fort Street between Washington and Griswold and Shelby between Congress and Lafayette this week, the newspaper reported. The movie will also shoot in the abandoned Michigan Central Depot. The same locations were used in 2005's The Island.
In August, SCI FI Wire visited the set of Transformers in downtown Los Angeles. http://www.scifi.com/scifiwire/index.php?category=0&id=37687 Transformers is also shooting in various cities, including Chicago and Washington. It is slated to open on July 4, 2007.
Pan Mirrors Devil's Backbone
Guillermo del Toro, writer and director of the upcoming fantasy film Pan's Labyrinth, told SCI FI Wire that the Spanish-language movie is a companion piece to his critically acclaimed 2001 film The Devil's Backbone. Both films share roughly the same historical milieu—during and after the Spanish Civil War—and mix fantastical elements with brutal realism. But the films also differ importantly.
"[The] Devil's Backbone ... was a movie that sort of looked at innocence and brutality or innocence in time of war, and I did it back in 2001," del Toro said in an interview last week. "And when it got released in America, it got released in America around Sept. 11th, and I felt that that story needed sort of a complementary piece now, because ... five years later, [everything] has changed so much, and I decided to try and make a movie that took place five years later. ... So Devil's Backbone was 2001. Now, this is 2006, and [while] Devil's Backbone was set in '39, ... Pan's Labyrinth is set in 1944."
Pan's Labyrinth centers on the character of 10-year-old Ofelia (Ivana Baquero), a dreamy girl enamored of fairy tales who moves to Navarra in the Spanish countryside with her mother, Carmen (Ariadna Gil), who is pregnant with the child of her new husband, the local Fascist military commander, Capt. Vidal (Sergi Lopez). In Navarra, as Capt. Vidal tries to track down rebels lurking in the woods, Ofelia finds herself drawn into a mysterious maze in the forest, where she makes the acquaintance of supernatural creatures who tell her that her fantastical destiny lies elsewhere.
"The idea was to literally explore how that world and our world have changed so much and make sort of a point about it in like a fable or a parable," del Toro said. "Not make a straight up political film, but use fantasy as a sounding board, like in Devil's Backbone."
But the two films are completely different, del Toro said. "They're similar, but I call them a sister and brother movie," he said. "They are a mirror movie. ... I think that Devil's Backbone, for example, is a very male film. It's a boy's movie. It's very much what it is to be a male child, a kid, a boy, and the brutality of that universe. And for me, Pan's Labyrinth is the cross between a female universe and a masculine force, which is a very brutal sort of paternal structure, ... that is fascism. I think that's one of the big differences. The bad guy in Pan's Labyrinth is a fascist. The bad guy in Devil's Backbone is a proto-fascist. The guy that, if he had the tools, the education and the resources, he may become a fascist, but he's just a bully right there. And this guy in Pan's Labyrinth is a full-blown fascist without any [reservation]."
Pan's Labyrinth, a Spanish-Mexican co-production, has been named Mexico's official entry for the best-foreign-film Oscar. It opens in limited release on Dec. 29 and goes wide in January. —Patrick Lee, News Editor
Del Toro Talks The Strain
Filmmaker Guillermo del Toro offered SCI FI Wire new details about the proposed television series he's developing, called The Strain. "It's horror," del Toro (Pan's Labyrinth) said in an interview last week in Los Angeles. He added: "It would be a really nasty, nasty fantasy. ... My deal is with Fox, and we're in the process of developing the story and seeing if we see eye to eye." Del Toro currently has a development deal with the Fox network.
Del Toro added: "I already wrote the bible and the character arcs for each character and so forth, so I'm doing all the documents on it." But he declined to say much about The Strain. "It's too early on, the very early stages of that."
Del Toro is also trying to develop video games. "I think that that's the where the future of storytelling is going to go to, a hybrid form that encompasses all of the narrative forms that we now know," he said. "TV, video games, movies, all of these into one." Del Toro's fantasy film Pan's Labyrinth is due to open in limited release on Dec. 29 before going wide in January 2007. —Patrick Lee, News Editor
Gillard Helming War Games 2
TV director Stuart Gillard (Charmed) has been tapped to helm the sequel to the 1983 Matthew Broderick film WarGames, the Production Weekly Web site reported.
Randall M. Badat has penned the sequel, War Games 2: The Dead Game, which is scheduled to begin principal photography mid-November in locations around Montreal.
The storyline follows a teenage hacker whose world gets turned upside after he plays an online terrorist-attack simulator game against a government supercomputer designed to profile potential terrorists. All hell breaks loose when Homeland Security is convinced that he's a terrorist intent on disrupting the fabric of society.
Kern Eyes Midnighters Show
Former Charmed executive producer Brad Kern told SCI FI Wire that he's trying to develop a television series based on the Scott Westerfeld young adult novel Midnighters: The Secret Hour. If everything were to come together, Kern would likely serve the production as executive producer.
"The most intriguing part about it is that there's a secret 25th hour that occurs at the stroke of midnight, so when the rest of us are frozen in time, basically, a whole hour exists, and in that frozen hour there are creepy, ghastly, ghostly beings that are trying to do bad things," Kern said in an interview. "There are also a select chosen few people, those who were born at midnight, who can actually live and walk amongst the frozen world. A car frozen on the street is actually going 50 miles an hour. Raindrops are frozen in place. But these Midnighters, as they walk through the rain, they actually carve out a hole because they're walking through it. So they have one hour to exist in this kind of co-existing world."
Kern added: "It's a very intriguing world. It's a very cinematically visual area. At this point I'm not yet convinced that we've figured out how to make it a series. We'd want to up the ages of the characters in the book from all teenagers in high school to probably [young adults] in their middle to late 20s. So there's a lot to work [still to be done], but it's an intriguing idea, and, of course, I adore and thrive in this supernatural realm. So it's something that allows me to be a daddy at home to my two kids and to, part-time, see if I can help Warner Brothers launch this new series." —Ian Spelling
Deal Includes Near Dark Remake
Michael Bay's production company, Platinum Dunes, has made a three-year, first-look deal with Rogue Pictures to develop horror films, including a a remake of the 1987 vampire movie Near Dark, Variety reported.
Rogue, the genre arm of Universal-based Focus Features, has made a deal with Platinum's Bay (director of the upcoming Transformers) and partners Brad Fuller and Andrew Form. The trio will produce horror films budgeted under $25 million and receive as much as 10 percent of the first-dollar gross, one of the richest producer deals in town. Platinum has already completed production on a Rogue remake of The Hitcher, for April release.
The Near Dark remake, about a cowboy wooed into joining a roving band of vampires, will be helmed by Samuel Bayer. Matt Venne is writing the script, and Charles Meeker and Amy Kaufman also produce. Production begins early next year.
The deal will also include a remake of 1987's The Changeling, which Rogue already had on its development roster. Separately, Platinum Dunes is remaking Hitchcock's The Birds for Universal Pictures.
Rogue, Focus and Universal are all owned by NBC Universal, which also owns SCIFI.COM.
Trek Auction Starts Big
The bidding began quickly on the first day of Christie's three-day New York auction of more than 1,000 lots of Star Trek memorabilia, with a captain's chair once belonging to Jean-Luc Picard from the bridge of the starship Enterprise-E going for a gavel price of $52,000—far beyond the presale estimate of $9,000, the Associated Press reported.
The auction kicked off on Oct. 5, with everything from costumes and props to blueprints and furniture on sale from the archives of CBS Paramount Television Studios. Bids were accepted on the floor, on the phone and on the Internet. Auction-house employees wore Star Trek costumes, including a pair of pointy Vulcan ears made famous by original star Leonard Nimoy.
The auction is one of several events being held to commemorate the 40th anniversary of Star Trek.
*[i]I have the Christies's catalogues for this and boy did I wish I could had bid on some of the stuff that were in it. I even have the price list of the winning bids. BTW there are two catalogues and both of them are about an inch thick.